I was recently rummaging through my pile of conversion tracking pixels in Facebook’s Business Manager when I noticed an alert that explicitly stated the ending of individual pixels.
As someone who is managing multiple lead gen promotions on Facebook, each requiring a unique tracking code, I was pretty excited. The fact is, this is a pretty big deal for anyone using the Facebook Ads platform, ESPECIALLY those using it for remarketing. I’ll explain…
So in the latter half of 2016, Facebook claims, they will be eliminating the option for advertisers to generate individual unique tracking pixels for conversion tracking and custom audience tracking. The intended purpose of having your tracking pixels unique and individual was to differentiate between conversion types. For example, you could have one to signify an e-commerce goal so that you could tie back to a specific Facebook ad.
I personally used these unique pixels to allow me to align my campaign strategies (i.e. website conversions) with my desired outcome from the subsequent ad (i.e. eBook download). I promoted a bunch of different whitepapers and had separate conversion pixels for each one. There are also separate tracking pixels to be placed on your website for remarketing purposes.
The reason this wasn’t so great was that every new promotion required a new pixel. Every new pixel had to be implemented on the destination landing page, and the end result was way too many pixels and a whole lot of javascript clutter. Not to mention a SEPARATE pixel that had to be placed on your website to track web traffic and allow you to remarket.
On a small scale it was workable, but the more complex your strategy becomes, the messier it gets. Thankfully, Facebook realized all this pixel nonsense was unnecessary and they took their pre-existing website pixel and made it better.
Behold: The Facebook Pixel. A little anti-climactic, but that’s what it’s called. I was let down too and was certainly rooting for something a little more transparent like “The Creep” but you know what, that’s life. So what’s the big fuss about this fancy new piece of tracking code? Take the three main reasons you created pixels before and now take the headache away from having to create and manage several of them.
The Facebook Pixel allows you to:
This is phenomenal because it simplifies a process in a marketing world where time is your greatest opponent. This super pixel will allow you to attain in-depth insights into website traffic and individual conversions. If you already have the old pixel set up for either custom audiences or conversions it will still work (for the time being). If you have the pre-existing Custom Audience pixel on your website you can continue to use it and just add custom events for conversion tracking and optimization.
For an in-depth walkthrough on how to upgrade your pixel go here.
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